“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

When I use the term “psyche,” many of you will immediately wonder about my definition.

Any word, simply by being thought, written or spoken, immediately implies a specification. In your daily reality it is very handy to distinguish one thing from another by giving each item a name. When you are dealing with subjective experience, however, definitions can often serve to limit rather than express a given experience. Obviously the psyche is not a thing. It does not have a beginning or ending. It cannot be seen or touched in normal terms. It is useless, therefore, to attempt any description of it through usual vocabulary, for your language primarily allows you to identify physical rather than nonphysical experience.

I am not saying that words cannot be used to describe the psyche, but they cannot define it. It is futile to question: “What is the difference between my psyche and my soul, my entity and my greater being?” for all of these are terms used in an effort to express the greater portions of your own experience that you sense within yourself. Your use of language may make you impatient for definitions, however. Hopefully this book will allow you some intimate awareness, some definite experience, that will acquaint you with the nature of your own psyche, and then you will see that its reality escapes all definitions, defies all categorizing, and shoves aside with exuberant creativity all attempts to wrap it up in a neat package.

When you begin a physical journey, you feel yourself distinct from the land through which you travel. No matter how far you journey — on a motorcycle, in a car or plane, or on foot — (gesturing to me as Seth, Jane then changed the sentence) by bicycle or camel, or truck or vessel, still you are the wanderer, and the land or ocean or desert is the environment through which you roam. When you begin your travels into your own psyche, however, everything changes. You are still the wanderer, the journeyman or journey-woman — but you are also the vehicle and the environment. You form the roads, your method of travel, the hills or mountains or oceans, as well as the hills, farms, and villages of the self, or of the psyche, as you go along.

Now if you are looking for simple definitions to explain the psyche, I will be of no help. If you want to experience the splendid creativity of your own being, however, then I will use methods that will arouse your greatest adventuresomeness, your boldest faith in yourself, and I will paint pictures of your psyche that will lead you to experience even its broadest reaches, if you so desire. The psyche, then, is not a known land. It is not simply an alien land, to which or through which you can travel. It is not a completed or nearly complete subjective universe already there for you to explore. It is, instead, an ever-forming state of being, in which your present sense of existence resides. You create it and it creates you.

(Long pause.) It creates in physical terms that you recognize. On the other hand, you create physical time for your psyche, for without you there would be no experience of the seasons, their coming and their passing.

There would be no experience of what Ruburt (Seth’s “entity” name for Jane) calls “the dear privacy of the moment,” so if one portion of your being wants to rise above the solitary march of the moments, other parts of your psyche rush, delighted, into that particular time-focus that is your own. As you now desire to understand the timeless, infinite dimensions of your own greater existence, so “even now” multitudinous elements of that nonearthly identity just as eagerly explore the dimensions of earthbeing and creaturehood.

(9:30.) Earlier I mentioned some odd effects that might occur if you tried to take your watch or other timepiece into other levels of reality. Now, when you try to interpret your selfhood in other kinds of existence, the same surprises or distortions or alterations can seem to occur. When you attempt to understand your psyche, and define it in terms of time, then it seems that the idea of reincarnation makes sense. You think “Of course. My psyche lives many lives physically, one after the other. If my present experience is dictated by that in my childhood, then surely my current life is a result of earlier ones.” And so you try to define the psyche in terms of time, and in so doing you limit your understanding and even your experience of it.

Now the psyche in our analogy is both the painting and the artist, for the artist finds that all of the elements within the painting are portions of himself. More, as he looks about, our artist discovers that he is literally surrounded by other paintings that he is also producing. As he looks closer, he discovers that there is a still-greater masterpiece in which he appears as an artist creating the very same paintings that he begins to recognize.

(Pause.) Again, rather than trying to define the psyche, I will try to incite your imagination so that you can leap beyond what you have been told you are, to some kind of direct experience. To some extent this book itself provides its own demonstration. I call Jane Roberts “Ruburt” (and, hence, “he” and “him”) simply because the name designates another portion of her reality, while she identifies herself as Jane. She writes her own books and carries on as each of you do in life’s ordinary context. She has her own unique likes and dislikes, characteristics and abilities; her own time and space slot as each of you do. She is one living portrait of the psyche, independent in her own context, and in the environment as given.

Now I come from another portion of reality’s picture, from another dimension of the psyche in which your existence can be observed, as you might look upon a normal painting.

(10:20.) So Ruburt’s subjective perspective opens up because of his desire and interest, and discloses my own. He opens up a door in himself that leads to other levels of his being, but a being that cannot be completely expressed in your world. That existence is mine, expressed in my experience at another level of reality, so I must write my books through Ruburt. Doors in the psyche are different from simple openings that lead from one room to another, so my books only show a glimpse of my own existence. You all have such psychological doors, however, that lead into dimensionally greater areas of the psyche, so to some extent or another I speak for those other aspects of yourselves that do not appear in your daily context.

On some relatively few occasions, for example, Ruburt has been able to contact what he calls “Seth Two.” That level of reality, however, is even further divorced from your own. It represents an even greater extension of the psyche, in your terms. (Long pause.) There is a much closer relationship, in that I recognize my own identity as a distinct portion of Seth Two’s existence, where Ruburt feels little correspondence. In a manner of speaking, Seth Two’s reality includes my own, yet I am aware of my contribution to “his” experience.

In the same way, each of my readers has a connection with the same level of psychic reality. In greater terms, all of this is happening at once. Ruburt is contributing and forming a certain portion of my experience, even as I am contributing to his. Your identities are not something already completed. Your most minute action, thought, and dream adds to the reality of your psyche, no matter how grand or austere the psyche may appear to you when you think of it as a hypothetical term.

Dictation: Ruburt has specialized in a study of consciousness and the psyche. Most of my readers are very interested, yet they have other pressing concerns that prevent them from embarking upon such an extended study.

In this new book, therefore, I will sometimes provide my own “scene setting.” The psyche’s production, in other words, has escaped practical, physical bounds, so that from my level of reality I can no longer expect Joseph to do more than record the sessions. I will ask you, my readers, to bear with me then. In my own way, I will try to provide suitable references so that you know what is going on physically in your time, as this book is written.

As you read this book, you are also immersed in such intimate physical experiences. Do not consider them as separated from the greater reality of your being, but as a part of it. You do not exist outside of your psyche’s being, but within it. Some of you may have just put children to bed as you read these lines. Some of you may be sitting at a table. Some of you may have just gone to the bathroom. These mundane activities may seem quite divorced from what I am telling you, yet in each simple gesture, and in the most necessary of physical acts, there is the great magical unknowing elegance in which you reside — and in the most ordinary of your motions, there are clues and hints as to the nature of the psyche and its human expression.

YOUR DREAMING PSYCHE IS AWAKE

(“No, I’m not,” she retorted. Her denial was both funny and dogged, for I could see that she was tired. But she went on: “Now let me get a couple of paragraphs on the chapter… The heading is: ‘Your Dreaming Psyche Is Awake.’” Then Seth came through at once:)

When you awaken, you try to squeeze the psyche’s language into terms of definition. You imagine that language and images are two different things, so you try to “put them together.” In dreams, however, you use the true ancient language of your being.

(Jane has decided that she’ll let my ordinary session notes — brief as they are — suffice for Psyche, and that she’ll add few, if any, of her own. She does plan to write an introduction, though.